Final Fantasy Hacktics

Thank you for this mod. As someone who is content with vanilla ps1 battle and character mechanics, but finds dismal many of the extraneous or side-issues directly addressed by this mod, what you've done here is exactly the sort of tweaks I was looking for. After not playing FFT for a long time, a recent delve quickly reminded me about old frustrations such as those remedied by Smart Encounters, as well as the time-savers to be found in Cross Fix and deprecating npc notifications. I like to pursue Propositions, but in the original game the ensuing and unavoidable random encounters (to pass time during prop completion) inevitably results in the characters levelling up by far too much to maintain challenge in fixed-rate story battles, so that point alone makes something like your mod vital in my opinion.

After easily installing/applying the mod using ppf-o-matic, I started a new game and everything seems working fine. I have a question, though, on one of your listed bugs. Meliadoul is a favorite character of mine and I always make heavy use of her; could you provide more detail on the listed issue regarding her, and how to avoid it in a vanilla game? Just avoid sending her on Proposition jobs, or is it more serious troubles?

The update sounds like it has a lot of interesting changes that will be fun to explore.

I'm not sure if anything can be done, but one other thing I noticed when I was playing recently that seemed like a bug concerns enemies in the Deep Dungeon who were previously allied with the player. They're able to trigger exits for the player's team.

For example, on one of the first Deep Dungeon levels (maybe the first), Algus was among the enemies. While Algus was moving around, he landed on the trigger square and kindly opened up the next level for my people.

Thanks for the mod. I'm wrapping up the Deep Dungeon right now, and will go into the final battles soon. Overall I enjoyed a lot of your customizations, such as the class changes and the different item functionality. Having enemies match the player's level in story battles and only having to do random encounters when desired were also wonderful improvements-- the latter was one of the things that usually makes me get bored and lose interest when playing the standard/original game.

My technical knowledge is zero, but as far as I know I used a clean iso when applying your mod. I just copied the iso I've been using for many years of the regular game, but I don't know the version or anything (nor how to check the version). My emulator is psx 1.13.

I looked just now, and it's just all armors and helmets Ramza Squire can equip, rather than all items. For weapons he is properly limited to swords, flails, daggers, and shields, and in accessories he can't use women's items (as it should be), so sorry for misreporting on that aspect.






On the high faith comments using low brave quotes, other than as you mentioned maybe my iso isn't standard (I've had it so long I don't remember anymore where it came from), the only unusual thing I did was that I wasn't satisfied with some of the original recruits (the ones that come along with Ramza from the military academy at the start of the game), so I gamesharked them to have Brave and Faith that I wanted in Chapter 1.

On the game balance, I think I could have used spellcasters or other characters successfully, but the difficulty would have been much greater and the battles would have taken much longer. The physical attack team I've been using (described earlier) are true behemoths, almost always cutting down all enemies in a five turns or less. So perhaps it's these physical characters who are too strong rather than mages being too weak, that's certainly possible. I'd say throughout the whole game so far only one battle gave me serious difficulty-- at Nevelska against Worker 7. I had to reset that one a number of times to win while also getting the shield and javelin buried items.

Keep up the good work. I'll definitely keep an eye out for updates, as I'd much prefer playing your mod to the regular version of the game.

I'm nearing the end of a game using this mod. This was my first time trying any FFT mod, and it has generally been a positive experience. The mod was easy to utilize for someone with no technical knowledge, and gameplay has been fun.

I only noticed two things that seem like bugs:

The "high faith" message at the end of each battle for generic characters is bugged. Characters with faith too high (85 or more) all say one of the "low brave" messages: "I'm...I'm afraid. I'm afraid of dying!" They don't cycle through all the low brave messages either, only this one line is invariably repeated every time by every character whose faith is too high.

In Chapter 4, Ramza in his Squire class is able to equip every single type of armor and weapon in the game. If this is intended that's fine, but it seemed strange to me.

Also, I think it was a bad decision to change "Move MP Up" to the Dancer skillset. The mod really exagerrates the original game problem of nearly useless spellcasting to the extreme point of totally useless spellcasting, and this one point in particular seems to be the icing on that cake (namely, now male spellcasters are implausible as they cannot reliably maintain MP).  As I said, I'm nearing the end of chapter 4, and I've used the same five physical attack characters in the same setups in every battle, finding no reason to change anything. I've enjoyed playing the mod-- lack of fun certainly isn't the issue here. But by reducing spellcasting to total irrelevance, there is a noticeable lack of variety or game balance if that was one of the mod's major goals.

Apart from the first chapter when I was figuring out how the mod plays, I've only used five characters to play through the whole game:

Ramza: Squire with Item secondary
Rad: Monk with either Basic Skill or Item secondary
Lavian: Ninja with Steal secondary
Mustadio: Engineer with Item secondary
Agrias: Holy Knight with Talk secondary

Overall, I'd say the author did a good job on this mod because the result is fun to play and there are no technical problems, even though I don't agree with some of the game design choices the mod presents.